


History of Present Illness

by LadyNighteyes



Category: Radiant Historia
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Crack, Gen, Medical
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-24 05:28:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13804407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyNighteyes/pseuds/LadyNighteyes
Summary: Sonja is going to figure out how Stocke isn't dead of anemia yet if it kills her.





	History of Present Illness

**Author's Note:**

> I'd been joking/threatening since I had a post about Dracula go viral on Tumblr last November that I was going to write a vampire AU.
> 
> In other words: when I posted this nonsense to Tumblr, _they were warned_.
> 
> And yes, I did in fact Google when and how blood types were discovered just to see if I could plausibly make the blood type joke with Alistel's tech level.

“Hey, Sonja, I’ve got one for you,” came Rosch’s boisterous voice from the doorway.

Sonja looked up from her microscope. She hadn’t been having much luck with these plant samples anyway.

Rosch was, indeed, standing in the doorway, his hand resting on the shoulder of a young man in the burgundy-red tabard of a low-ranking soldier. He was blond, sharp-featured, with heavy-lidded eyes, and she ordinarily would have described him as quite handsome. Assuming, that is, that he didn’t ordinarily look downright alarmingly pale.

“This is Private Stocke,” Rosch said. “The one I was telling you about the other day, remember? He passed out during drills just now.”

“I _tripped_ ,” Stocke said. “This is a waste of all our time, Rosch.” Sonja was surprised by the accent- sharp, clipped, and aristocratic.

“Fine. He tripped, lay on the ground without moving for a good ten seconds, and then nearly strangled me when I tried to check his pulse,” Rosch said. “And he’s been getting paler and paler for weeks. I need you to take a look at him, Sonja.”

“No head injuries? Any other symptoms?”

“No,” Stocke said, while Rosch was opening his mouth to answer. “And we ran seven miles yesterday evening, so if anything was going to happen, it would have happened then. I’m _fine_.”

“That’s my job to decide, Private, not yours,” Sonja said. “Now, go sit down so I can take your blood pressure.”

Rosch hovered in the doorway as she went looking for a cuff. She wondered if he considered the soldier a flight risk. Perhaps it was justified- he went tense when she got close, in a way that almost reminded her of a cornered animal- but he was cooperative enough with Rosch’s eyes on him. His pulse was normal, though his hands were cold, and she frowned suspiciously at the meter when she took his blood pressure. She’d have to have it tested later. Those numbers _couldn’t_ be right.

“When was the last time you ate?” she said.

“Breakfast this morning. Same as everyone else.”

“And what was it?”

“Porridge. Same as everyone else. Doctor, it was just a dizzy spell. I’m fine.”

“I’ll need to draw some blood to test for anemia,” she said, pointedly ignoring the last comment.

The soldier sighed, but, under Rosch’s warning look, grudgingly rolled up his sleeve.

–

If there was one good thing about how often Stocke seemed to end up in the hospital, it was that by this point Sonja could trust him to hold still, she thought as she finished suturing the cut on his forehead.

It wasn’t much of a silver lining. He came with his own host of esoteric and specialized problems, on top of all the usual ones. For instance, that he was currently on his third unit of blood, and this was far from the worst she’d seen him.

The fact that he always seemed ashamed about the dent he was singlehandedly making in the hospital’s blood bank and tried to convince her it wasn’t necessary was rather farther down the list, filed under “petty.”

“There,” she said, tying the thread off. “Now, don’t go trying to heal those, or it’ll just make it worse.”

“I’ve had stitches before, Sonja,” Stocke said, tiredly.

“You’ve had a lot of things before, but that hasn’t stopped you from ignoring my instructions about any of them.”

He shrugged, and then winced. Apparently he’d forgotten the long cut across his chest she’d stitched up first.

“Honestly, Stocke, if you were anyone else, I’d think you were doing it on purpose to get a medical discharge. How do you even manage to lose so much blood?” She’d resorted to testing him for hemophilia a while back. It had been negative, of course- he wouldn’t have lasted this long otherwise- but she was running out of other explanations for how he stayed so anemic when she’d tried everything short of force-feeding him steak.

He met her gaze with that steady, calm look that Sonja suspected meant there was about a 30% chance he was about to lie through his teeth. “I don’t. I’ve said again and again, you’re overreacting. There’s no need for… all of this.” He gestured at the IV in his right hand, though he kept his eyes on hers. Sonja had noticed he often seemed to avoid looking when she gave him blood, in an oddly specific sort of squeamishness.

“The fact that your recovery time averages around half as long when I give you a blood transfusion suggests otherwise,” she said sweetly.

Stocke raised his eyebrows and asked dryly, “And how long did you spend calculating that?”

“I did it over my lunch break last Friday, if you must know,” she said. “I’m sure Chief Fennel would tell me we don’t have enough data to draw statistically significant conclusions, but as that’s out of the question, I did the best I could.”

Not that she’d really needed to run the numbers; you could _see_ him looking better within minutes. It was uncanny, really. Sonja privately suspected she could give him a transfusion for a head cold and it would help.

Stocke sighed, the way he always did when he knew he was losing an argument and had decided to pretend he thought the subject was too petty to be worth debating.

But there was something-

“Stocke,” she said, frowning, “you didn’t get hit in the mouth, did you?”

His hand went to his lips reflexively. “What? No, just the knife wounds.”

“Could you open your mouth for me, please?” she said.

He obeyed, surprisingly without even rolling his eyes.

For a moment, his teeth had seemed…

“Hmm. I suppose it was just my imagination,” Sonja said.

–

“I swear to Noah’s name,” Sonja said, “that if I could just figure you out, I could make medical history.”

“You’re overthinking it, Sonja,” Stocke said. He was sprawled sideways in an armchair, one leg hooked over an armrest, eyes fixed on a book she was fairly sure he wasn’t actually trying to read. As much as Sonja worried about him- he’d gotten progressively quieter and stranger in the years since his transfer to Special Intelligence- he certainly _looked_ better, and she didn’t think it was just that the bright red clothes he’d taken to wearing suited him better than the uniform tabard. There was more color in his face.

“You’re absolutely certain you can’t think of anything that makes you feel light-headed? Weak? Tired?”

“No. I keep telling you, I feel fine.”

Sonja threw up her hands in exasperation. “Your blood cell count doesn’t just double in three days without you feeling anything, Stocke! Especially not like clockwork nearly every time Heiss sends you out of the city! There has to be _something_ here in Alistel you’re reacting negatively to, and that’s throwing off the test somehow. Could it be something in the thaumatech fumes?”

“Then your numbers would have gone up back when I was in the army and we got sent out for training exercises,” he said, not looking up. “When I came back and you said you couldn’t understand how I was still alive.”

He was right. Damn. “Something in the food, then?” she said. “I know you mostly eat from the mess hall-”

“I bring field rations with me the same as everyone else, Sonja,” he said.

“Then we’ll need to find out what’s in the mess hall food that isn’t in the field rations, won’t we?”

Stocke closed his book, keeping his place with one finger, and looked up at her. “Sonja, relax. If it was as big of a problem as you seem to think it is, they wouldn’t have cleared me for field duty.”

Sonja rolled her eyes. “They only cleared you because the other doctors all take one look at the test results and assume there must have been a mistake, Stocke.”

“And they think that because there aren’t any other symptoms. If I was that sick, there would be more than a number to show for it.”

“Then I owe it to everyone to find out how you’re doing so well so we can use it to help people with _real_ anemia, don’t I?” she said, with the winning smile of someone meeting nonsense with nonsense. “Or if the tests are wrong, we’ll certainly need to know _that_. We wouldn’t want to give someone a treatment they don’t need just because the test is flawed, after all.”

Stocke didn’t reply, but the look he gave her was extremely eloquent, especially on the entire subject of sarcastic doctors.

–

“Forward,” Stocke’s voice whispered in the darkness, and Sonja obediently walked, hauling Rosch’s unconscious weight along with her and hoping she didn’t trip. Their breath was almost as loud as their footsteps in the strange, deadened bubble.

It made perfect sense that if they were invisible, she wouldn’t be able to see, but it didn’t make it easier.

“Turn left,” he said, and she did.

They walked a little further in that featureless space before he whispered, “Stairs,” and Sonja winced as the two of them hauled Rosch’s body up between them. She would have killed for a stretcher. Failing that, the option to carry him another way would have been nice, but there had been enough damage to the Gauntlet’s nerve interface that a fireman’s carry could have paralyzed his right arm as well. So dragging him between them it was.

“Forward.”

“Turn right.”

“Left.” Strain was starting to creep into his voice.

“ _Stop_.”

It was a sudden hiss, and Sonja froze instantly, heart pounding, frantically straining her ears for any sound from outside, her arm tightening around Rosch’s waist. But there was nothing, and a few seconds later, Stocke’s voice said, “Forward.”

She could hear rain now, the sound muffled as if through a heavy blanket. “Left.”

And then, all at once, the world came back.

They were in an alley just outside the castle gates, still under the overhang of the walls. A few feet away, the rain drizzled down halfheartedly. The yellowish glow of the street lamps didn’t reach this far into the alley, and the light that filtered down through the clouds was a dishwater grey that made it hard to believe it was barely noon.

Sonja nearly stumbled under Rosch’s weight as Stocke slumped, breathing heavily.

“Stocke? Are you all right?”

“Give me a minute,” he said.

They set Rosch down, his back propped up against the alley wall. There wasn’t so much as a flicker of an eyelid. Stocke slid down beside him, leaning his head back against the wall, eyes closed.

He looked _ashen_ , and Sonja hoped it was just the light. Prophet, what would she do if she had to try to protect _both_ of them?

She knelt down to check Rosch’s injuries, just to keep herself busy. And that’s when the guard stumbled into the mouth of the alley.

She had just long enough to see the resigned expression on Stocke’s face before what happened next.

–

“You’re a _vampire?!_ ”

“A dhampyr, technically,” Stocke said, getting his shoulder under Rosch’s Gauntlet and heaving him to his feet. He wiped a smear of blood off his chin with the back of his hand. “He won’t remember anything when he wakes up, but we’d better get out of here before the rest of his squad come looking.”

“You’re a _vampire_.”

“I’m not. I can’t shapeshift, and I don’t burn in sunlight.”

“Do you,” Sonja said, carefully and deliberately, “have _any_ idea how much _time I’ve wasted_ over the years re-running your blood tests because you’d need to be _dead_ to have numbers that low?”

Stocke gave her a long, blank stare. “… _That’s_ what you’re concerned about?”

–

“This _entire time_ , you just _stood by_ and let me go to my _wit’s end_ trying to find out what was wrong with you-” Sonja readjusted Rosch’s arm around her shoulder; it was harder to keep him steady now that they were out of the city and off the paved roads near it. “-and the _entire time_ , the problem was that you were a _gods-damn vampire!_ ”

“I did tell you you didn’t need to worry about it.” He’d stopped protesting the label a mile or so back.

“The way it went up when you left town! You were just- just hunting down a deer or something, weren’t you?!”

Sonja was aware she was displacing her stress onto him. She also did not care.

“If animal blood worked, I could just buy some off a butcher,” he said. “Believe me, I tried.”

“Then…?”

“Enemy scouts and guards, mostly,” Stocke said, making a face.

“So what you’re telling me is that not only are you a vampire, you’re a _half-starved_ vampire?! All those hours counting cells under a microscope, and all I needed to do was give you a key to the blood bank freezer?!”

"I’m not stealing from _a hospital_ , Sonja!” He sounded genuinely appalled for a man she’d recently watched sink his teeth into someone’s neck.

“That would be very noble of you if you weren’t _a universal donor, Stocke_. Do you realize I had to match your blood type for every single one of those transfusions?!”

“You may remember I tried to talk you out of those, too,” he said, in that infuriatingly reasonable voice.

“You realize,” Sonja said, with a brittle brightness fueled by the mud up to her knees, the ache in her back, the chill creeping in from her sodden clothes, and the terror she was trying not to dwell on, “that if you are a universal donor, I can only give you transfusions of the most valuable type of blood we have? But if you are an actual Prophet-defend-us _vampire_ I could just give you any blood we had and you could drink it? And that if you had told me, then all this time, I could have been giving you the AB we keep having to throw away because it’s been stored too long?”

“You wouldn’t have believed me,” he said, but he at least had the decency to look embarrassed.

“You have _fangs!_ ”

Stocke seized the opportunity presented by the need to lift Rosch’s body over a log to avoid answering.

“And don’t think I’m not going to find out how you hid that from me all this time, either! If we make it out of this alive, you are going to show me _exactly_ what you did back there until I know _exactly_ how it works!”

That was a big if. Sonja tried not to think about it.

“Minor shapeshifting. A real vampire could change more than that. I can’t.”

“How much more ‘real vampire’ do you get than _needing to drink human blood?!_ ”

“I _shouldn’t_ need to!” he snapped. “I didn’t, until I came to the city! I ignored it until I was eighteen and nothing happened, and then I joined the army and within a month I was-”

“You _what?!_ ”

–

“There they are! Over there!” came a voice from up the hill.

Sonja managed to shoulder Rosch’s weight just in time as Stocke stepped back and drew his sword. “Sonja! Go!”

“Stocke,” she shouted over her shoulder, “if you die before you can give me a proper explanation for all of this, I’m _never_ going to forgive you!”

He shot her a fanged smile, and then ran back to meet the soldiers.


End file.
